Tipsheet

Guess Why a Yale Newspaper Censored This Column by a Jewish Student

Madeline Leesman
Madeline Leesman  |  October 31, 2023 2:45 PM

Yale University’s campus newspaper reportedly censored a pro-Israel columnist over what it described as “unsubstantiated claims” that the terrorist organization Hamas “raped women and beheaded men.” 

Last week, the Yale Daily News reportedly cut out this reference from a column from Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore who is Jewish. Tartak’s column, titled “Is Yallies4Palestine a hate group?” condemned a student organization that blamed Israel for Hamas’ attack. 

“Do you know who I hold responsible? The men with the guns and axes who killed the children and abducted the grandmothers,” Tartok wrote. “Violent resistance against the State is different from murdering babies with their families, which was Hamas’ only accomplishment this week — not liberation. And why is Y4P not rejecting but celebrating the horrors in and of themselves?”

“Anyone with eyes can see that streets lined with dead civilian bodies are a bad thing. Mothers screaming for their children? Bad thing. Do I have to go on? Watch the videos before you celebrate “the resistance,” I urge you. If you’re any sort of human being at all, they’ll make you sick. Imagine it’s you or your mother or your little brother. Would you call that resistance? No. Who would you blame? I’d blame the perpetrator — not the victim. Campus hate groups, which I define by their support for terror, are free to disagree. But you don’t want to be a part of that,” she added.

On Oct. 25, the school paper added an editor’s note claiming that the piece was edit to remove the claims about Hamas raping and beheading Israelis.

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“I'm still collecting my thoughts on the YDN's egregious correction. But until then, what Prof. Christakis and others have said does the job,” Tarktak wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. 

She reposted remarks from Yale Professor Nicholas Christakis asking, “Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?”

Tartak later shared a letter from two former YDN editors slamming the publication for editing her piece.

“We write this open letter to express our profound disappointment over an editor’s note appended o a recent opinion column published in the News,” the letter stated before pointing out that mainstream outlets like The New York Times reported that Hamas brutalized and killed women. 

“It defies belief that this editorial board would therefore characterize claims of rape during the Hamas attack as ‘unsubstantiated’ in the face of ample substantiation in major news outlets,” the letter concluded. “And it shocks the conscience that a generation of students who implore us to ‘believe women’ who allege rape is suddently willing to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes when the women raped are Israeli? The hypocrisy is breathtaking.”